Search Engine Marketing Blog

If you’re fairly active online, you’ve no doubt come across the news that Google’s Knol is now open for business.

First of, what is it? Apparently “a knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic“. Interesting word, ‘authoritative’. Presumably that’s different to having just anyone write about anything they fancy?

Why do we need it? I have to be honest and say that I don’t really know. For Google, I’m sure there are many good reasons to have these “authoritative articles” as content within their own system and it will be interesting to see how much of this content is unique to Knol as opposed to having been published elsewhere, either on the author’s own site or some third party platform such as Wikipedia who publish authoritative articles about specific topics. Hang on a sec…

When it comes to duplicate content, we all know that Google frowns upon this appearing in its own very popular search engine so it will be fascinating to see how they deal with this issue in Knol. Aaron Wall of SEObook fame has recently published an article (on his own site, interestingly enough) entitled “Google Knol - Google’s Latest Attack on Copyright“. He’s run through an experiment he carried out with his own knol that certainly seems to have highlighted some interesting points with regards how Google is starting to rank these in its index.

Clearly this is very early days for Google Knol but let’s hope it can sit alongside other comparative services rather than attempting to squeeze the smaller sites out.

When it comes to Social Media, Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called, there’s a lot of companies trying to find a way to cash in on the trend of connecting with people (known or unknown) online and finding happiness in having so many friends…

Anywhere there’s a gathering of people, there’s sure to be advertisers wanting to unlock some cash from these social groups but how effective is it?

At this point I should declare that at Impact Media, we are performing a full evaluation of the Social Media space but do not currently offer professional services in this area.

Aaron Wall has recently published a great article - The Inconvenient Truth About Social Media Marketing - which basically suggests this area does not monetise. Of course, others would beg to differ and, looking at some of the multi-million dollar tie ups between major software companies, search engines and the current darlings of social media, you’d have to believe that there is gold in them there hills!

Purely from a marketing perspective, I guess my advice to anyone looking at investing in this marketplace right now, is to tread carefully and ensure that you take small steps and carry out tests just as you would any other Internet marketing platform. If you’re a business looking to sell more products or services, I would also ensure that you’ve fully exploited the more orthodox search marketing efforts, e.g. search engine optimisation and pay per click before moving into Social Media.

Meanwhile, I’m off to buy myself a white elephant